Challenges Asset Managers face with their growing portfolio

With increased investment in solar PV installments, many solar companies are growing their portfolio through acquisitions, new site development or other strategies. With more than 75 GW of solar power installed worldwide in 2016, there’s a growing opportunity for effective management of these new assets.While expanding your portfolio is a good way to increase income, it also comes with challenges that need to be addressed beforehand. Here are a few considerations to keep in mind while acquiring new solar assets.

Aggregate monitoring:

The acquired sites, depending on the developers, may use different SCADA systems. While monitoring these sites individually is not hard, monitoring aggregate production from all sites can be challenging. Multiple SCADA systems requires asset managers to maintain and protect multiple login credentials, learn several different interfaces and pull the same data from different sources any time a report is desired. This asset manager ends up doing the same activity over and over again taking far more time than if a single interface were used instead. Consider the SCADA system of assets added to your portfolio and develop a strategy to make SCADA integration efficient.

Documentation management:

Having complete historic information is crucial to operation and maintenance of a new plant. However, effective tracking can be challenging with all the old reports, warranty documentation, contracts and others that come with a recently acquired asset. Without an effective strategy to sort and organize the documents, staff will spend an excessive time looking for the information they need. Make sure you sort your documents when acquiring new projects to avoid this issue in the future.

Asset analysis:

An asset that performs well is given regular attention. Asset managers track its technical and financial performance to identify shortcomings and solutions to improve output. Some manual report generation techniques that work well with small portfolios may need some level of automation as the portfolio grows. This will allow your team’s time to be spent on optimizing asset output and not on repetitive report generation.

Early detection of under-performing assets:

It’s critical to identify under performing assets as early as possible to maximize your return on investment. Sub optimal performance can be due to poor design or lack of maintenance. Onboarding new assets into your portfolio comes with a number of challenges. Staff may be swamped with work and the new plant may be neglected. Ensure that new assets are monitored from the time of acquisition to ensure best returns.

Dealing with various O&M companies:

New acquired plants may have been maintained by external O&M companies. It is possible that after buying new assets, you end up dealing with several O&M firms. The operations of these firms may be very different from each other. It is in the best interest of your company to standardize the process of ticketing, monitoring and contacting O&M firms to save time.

Well Rounded Solution

If you have multiple solar assets across a wide geographical location and want to be able to easily manage all these sites from a centralized location, consider Arbox Hap®. It will allow you to use different functionalities such as aggregate SCADA monitoring, document management, automated reporting and more, all in a single platform. Using Asset Management software not only saves you time and resources, but also reduces risks of missing important deadlines and missing out on important documents. Contact us to learn more.

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